This announcement was coincidentally released alongside the fact that iLife, iWork and the new OSX Mavericks would be released free of charge for users of Snow Leopard+ (OSX 10.6+)
In almost precisely a year after it's quiet removal from the Apple Online Store, the Mac Pro reappears with baseline specs one can expect from a year's worth of silence on the market. Does the polish Apple is laying on the new Mac Pro really shine as brightly as they would have us believe? Mac Pro has always offered two tiers to start purchasing from. Taking a note for the progression of, over a years worth of technology, I will be comparing the spec's individual to these tiers based on the offered numbers from each listing.
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| October 16, 2012 |
For $2500, this time last year, you could be the proud owner of a 40 lb. customizable tower, with a standard assortment of ports and competitive specs for a Quad core tower of the time.
First tier for $2500
3.2 Ghz quad core Xeon
6GB memory
1TB hard drive
and a single GPU
Second Tier for $3800
2.4Ghz dual 6 cores
double the memory
same hard drive
same GPU
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| October 22nd, 2013 |
Come December (ending a 14 month dry-spell in the pro market for new machines,) what do we have to compare? A machine that weighs considerably less and is quieter than the mac pro tower of old and little to almost no ability to customize past your original order.
First Tier for $3000 (+$500)
3.7 Quad core Xeon (.5 Ghz "faster")
12 GB memory (double that of the 2012 model)
Dual upgraded GPUs (+1 GPU)
256 GB SSD (vs. 1TB internal drive)
Second Tier for $4000 (+$200)
3.5 Ghz 6 core Xeon processor (+1.1 Ghz & 1/2 the cores)
16GB memory (+4 GB)
Dual upgraded GPU's (+1 GPU, +1GB RAM/per)
256 GB SSD (vs. 1TB internal drive)
There are a lot of comparisons we could jump straight into, and there is a lot of discussion about what FirePro D300 offers over the dated Radeon 5770's Apple was offering in 2012 (which had been the same stale offering for the last few years,) or the differences between a Xeon E5 processor vs. a Xeon 1st gen. However, I feel that we can allow for the progression of technology over 14 months to balance these facts out in the wash.
What concerns me more, is that Apple seems to be doing its laundry in a different machine than the one I am. What seems to me to be a reasonable upgrade given the lapse in presence on the market, is asking for an additional investment of $500 more than it did last year for an entry level model. Given the fact that one can build their own machine with comparable specs for $1600 raises the appeal for "hackintosh" systems considerably, despite their current inability to hotswap Thunderbolt ports (which isn't really advised for most devices anyways,) and a complicated upgrade procedure for new OSX releases.
One of the perks that is being marketed openly is that the machine is made exclusively in the US. (How far this actually reaches remains to be determined, but for all the "recent" Foxcon press, I feel this is a smart move on behalf of the company, and would add to the premium of the machine.)
Considering that in their latest press release, Apple is marketing the new Mac Pro as the computer that you'll have for "the next ten years," the reccomendation follows that one could build a hackintosh once the Mavericks OS is cracked, and have the same decade proof machine for almost a full $1000 less than the baseline offering.
In business, the money that you pay a company that is above the understood markup is called the "goodwill" of that company. Given the alternatives in forming a comparable machine, it seems Apple may have overreached their initial pricing on these machines, given also that the company has previously held a strong policy of keeping their other products relatively price-locked, despite whatever new add-ons they may be offering in order to remain competitive with market trends. Do you think Apple's goodwill offering is worth what they're asking?
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